Fediverse : Discover where all the freedom went

“In the beginning the Universe was created. This had made many people very angry and has been widely regarded as a bad move.” ― Douglas Adams, The Restaurant at the End of the Universe.

The beginning of the internet universe is generally traced back to the creation of its predecessor ARPANET in 1966. That makes its lifetime just shy of 60 years and I've been accessing it for a little over 30 years. If the internet was the universe, I'd be about as old as Alpha Centauri. That would make me considerably older than the Earth itself. The kids on TikTok would probably be some of our early ape ancestors (this may not be a bad analogy, actually).

For the benefit of younger readers (the secret is to bang the rocks together, guys) let me describe what the internet was like back in the early 1990s. Firstly, it was basically all text. Videos, music, online console games, virtual reality were all far-off fantasies.

Secondly, it was very much not mobile. You had to use a desktop computer (mobile phones in those days were considered state of the art if you could play Snake on them) and you had to connect it to the home telephone line (ask your parents what one of those was) or possibly the office or university network if you were lucky.

Thirdly, it made screeching noises and stopped anyone else from using the phone which annoyed your younger brother and sister who wanted to use it for such crazy things as talking to their friends.

By now a young person is probably thinking "so what the hell was the point of it?" And, to be honest, a lot of people asked me that at the time as well. Being "on the internet" was a nerdy thing which the mainstream normal people could not get their heads around. "Why do you need to plug the phone into the computer?" was a question I frequently heard.

But us early adopters could see the potential. Already there was a wealth of knowledge and resources online. We may not have had Google but we had Gopher, a text based browser of sorts which could connect to databases curated and shared by mostly academic and hobbyist users. We didn't have social media but we had Usenet groups : (mostly) text based discussions where you could find people all over the world who shared your nerdy interests. We had email. We had instant messaging in the form of IRC and later ICQ.

In the three decades I've been online things have got hugely more exciting and then hugely more depressing. The bandwidth and processing power available to us now is phenomenal. At home, I have a fibre optic connection giving me 24/7 high speed internet access and nobody even cares about whether they can use the landline phone because we're all walking around with personal wirelessly networked computers in our pockets.

Before the web took off and dotcoms boomed and bust in the early 2000s, the internet was the realm of individuals not corporations. Now it's the other way round. We get our news and entertainment from billion dollar companies. Those same hugely valuable businesses gorge themselves on our personal data, watching every move we make online, linking millions of data points together til they know us better than our own families do. And then they sell us to the highest bidders to be targetted with ads and misinformation. We constantly have to battle with ad blockers, dummy email addresses, captchas and cookie consents. Being online in the mid 2020s is a slog.

It doesn't have to be like that though. There are still corners of the internet where the pioneer spirit still exists. Open source software is one such corner. But more than that, there are open standards. The reason the web took off as fast as it did was because it was open. Anyone could create a web site and anyone could visit any web site because the standards that made it possible were open and free.

Today there are open standards for any of the things we do online. One that has received a lot of attention over the past year or so is the ActivityPub standard which underpins the so-called Fediverse. That's "a collection of social networking services that can communicate with each other (formally known as federation) using a common protocol" [Wikipedia]. The best known of those services is Mastodon which is a microblogging site similar to Bluesky or the network previously known as Twitter. There's also a YouTube-like video service PeerTube, an Instagram-ish photo sharing service Pixelfed and a Reddit-type service called Lemmy. The Ghost blogging platform that underpins this very article will shortly be joining the Fediverse too.

Round about the same time that I first got on to the internet I was also getting onto my mountain bike. I had a sticker on the frame that read "Ride and discover where all the freedom went". We need to have a new sticker to put on the internet : "Fediverse : discover where all the freedom went"